at the entrance - 2 hours later it looked frightening!

Our departure day and we're going nowhere as we wait for another 'Mistral' to pass. By our calculations this year the Mistral seems to occur once every 7 days. We've also noticed that there appears to be telltale signs of a pending blow as a sea surge occurs before the wind arrives later. This Mistral wasn't particularly strong, barely a force 6 but it virtually closed the marina because of the large seas at the entrance. Waves pounded the marina breakwater, sending bucketfulls of sea water and spray over the top, covering the cars parked just the other side - it's a good job none of the cars were open-top because it was an extremely hot day.

During our month here we've concluded that the visitor pontoon suffers badly from surge. Our passerelle is 2 meters so we're restricted to leaving a gap of just under 2 meters between Flirtie and the concrete pontoon. To date this has been sufficient but it's questionable here as the forward and aft lines constantly pull against each other - a tug of war between ropes with Flirtie in-between, momentum taking her ever closer to the wall. We never did touch but a larger gap would have been better and is something that we need to be mindful of in the future when mooring med-style.